Famed Restaurant Noma Sends Help to Somali Restaurateur

Chefs at Copenhagen's Restaurant Noma aims to raise €12,000 to help rebuild a restaurant destroyed in Mogadishu bombings.

Chefs at Copenhagen's Noma have launched an appeal to support a restaurant owner in Somalia, after his restaurant became the target of a suicide attack and a car bomb, killing at least 18 people, AFP reports. The recent attack, reportedly carried out by Al Qaeda-inspired insurgents, was the third to hit restaurateur Ahmed Jama’s restaurant The Village, located in the capital Mogadishu.

Noma, ranked number two on S. Pellegrino's list of the World's 50 Best Restaurants, started accepting donations for Jama’s restaurant on an Internet crowd-sourcing site, and sent out tweets asking fans and followers to chime in and help.

"Guys, lets help out chef Ahmed in Somalia rebuild," Noma founder René Redzepi wrote on Twitter.

Only two days in, more than half of the €12,000 goal has already been raised.

Jama, who had been living in London for several years, returned to his war-torn home country Somalia in 2008. He told CNN in an earlier interview that he hoped to open restaurants in an effort to spread peace in the restless capital Mogadishu. "The only reason why I came here is to change the lives of the people who don't have somewhere to work and people who have been locked indoors and they don't have anywhere to go and socialize," Jama told CNN.